Click HERE for a Vienna slide show.
Vienna, like most European cities, was at one time a walled city. It was necessary to have walls to protect the city from invading Ottomans (the Turks, not the furniture), or any other marauding armies that happened along. But by the middle of the 19th century, the nature of war had changed and Austrian Emperor Franz Josef decided to demolish the city walls. (War had not ended, of course, it had just changed to the point that the walls were no longer protective. This was about a century before the aerial bombardment of Vienna by the Allies in WWII.) In place of the walls, he built the Ringstrasse, the wide boulevard that encircles old Vienna. Old Vienna is now referred to as “The 1st District”, and is the historic heart of the city, as well as the most expensive real estate. The villages and towns that encircled Vienna outside of its walls were incorporated into Vienna at the time the Ringstrasse was built and were given district numbers. I have been told that the lower the number, the more prestigious (and expensive) the district. While most the tourist sites are in the 1st District, I had decided that there was no reason to stay there, since hotels there are more expensive, and since public transportation is good throughout Vienna.
Thus, on this day, around six o’clock our train pulls into the Westbahnhof in Mariahilf, the 6th District. We get off the train and find our way to our hotel, the Ibis Wien Mariahilf, that we soon find to be an overpriced, 340 room, bland, uninspired tourist barn. I had reserved two adjoining rooms, each with a double and a single bed. What we find upon check-in is two rooms with double beds. After some back and forth with the desk, I am able to acquire a room with two beds for Mike and Madeline. By making the switch though, we no longer have adjoining rooms, and are not even on the same floor.
The weather has turned quite warm and we find that our hotel rooms are even warmer. Every other hotel that we’ve stayed at in Austria and Germany has had windows that opened. Not this one. The windows are locked and there are small signs explaining that opening the windows is not necessary since the hotel is air-conditioned. The air-conditioning does not seem to work. I call the desk about the stuffy, hot room and nonfunctioning air-conditioner. The young woman I speak with tells me that she will make sure that our problem is dealt with within ten minutes (signs in the elevator proclaim that guests problems will be addressed by the hotel staff within ten minutes). She says that she doesn’t know how to explain it in English, but the solution, nevertheless, is less than ten minutes away. In maybe nine minutes there is a knock at our door. When I open the door, a young woman is standing there, perhaps the same young woman I had spoken to on the phone. She is holding an oscillating fan. She hands it to me and says that this will solve the problem of my stuffy room. By the time I recover from my shock and disbelief, she’s gone, and I’m holding an oscillating fan. The weather cools down outside, but the room never cools. I use the fan. The air conditioning never works. By the second night, Mike and Madeline also have an oscillating fan.
Kathy is suffering from a cold that had been developing for the last several days, so she decides spend some quality time in our room with the oscillating fan, while Mike, Madeline, and I go out for dinner. Madeline mentions pizza, but we wind up at a nearby restaurant serving good beer and standard Austrian fare. It is late by the time we get back to the hotel, so we call it a night.
The next morning we have breakfast in the hotel’s charmless subterranean breakfast facility. The food is OK, but there are too many people crammed into the available space.
This is Mike’s last day in Austria, so we decide that he should choose our activities for the day. Mike decides that we will start at Schoennbrun, the opulent summer palace of the Habsburgs, the family that ruled Austria for over six centuries, and also ruled over Spain, and numerous other countries. The Habsburgs collected countries (through conquest, marriage, midnight poker games, etc.) like other people collect stamps, Star Trek memorabilia, or rubber ducks. I’ve been told that my great-grandmother Svec was upset to her dying day that her immigration papers to the U.S. listed her nationality as Austrian. She was Bohemian. The Austrians were the conquerors.
We reach Schoennbrun after a short ride on the U-bahn. I am immediately impressed with the sheer scale of the place. It is the sort of place where an emperor would live. The grounds cover 145 sculpted and manicured acres. The massive main palace has 300 rooms. If you include the rooms in the ancillary buildings, there are 1441 rooms in the entire complex. And this was the just the summer home.
This is the most visited tourist site in Austria, which is obvious when we arrive at ten o’clock by the long lines of people waiting to get in the palace. My guide books suggests that while most people start their exploration of Schoennbrun with the main palace, an alternative is to first climb the hill to the Gloriette, a small columned building on a hilltop, to get a bird’s-eye view of the grounds. Given the long lines to the palace, we choose that option. The hike to the Gloriette is not a short one. The day is already hot so we follow a path up the hill that keeps us in the shade of a line of trees. We pause at the elaborate Neptune Fountain at the base of the hill, and then make the climb to the Gloriette. Both Neptune’s Fountain and the Gloriette were added as part of the redesign that occurred in the 1770’s under the empress Maria Theresa. She was so fond of the Gloriette that when her corpulence and age prevented her from walking to the top of the hill, she would have litter bearers carry her to the top. Since we have to walk up on our own power, it is nice to find a pleasant outdoor café on the back side of the Gloriette when we get to the top. I have a wonderful coffee and ice cream treat. The others try to make me feel guilty by ordering water. But I do not feel guilty at all and have a lot more fun than they do. I can imagine Maria Theresa sitting in the Gloriette consuming large amounts of coffee and ice cream. Yay for being old and fat and enjoying life!
After spending a few minutes viewing the palace grounds from the high point of the Gloriette we start back down the hill. On the way down, we notice signs for the Tiegarten (Zoo), also located on the palace grounds. This was originally the royal zoo and has since become the Vienna public zoo. Prominently displayed on the zoo signs is a picture of an almost anthropomorphically smiling cute little baby panda. Madeline is completely entranced and it becomes obvious to her that visiting the Tiegarten and seeing the baby panda could be the most important thing that we do while in Vienna, if not in our lives.
So we detour to the zoo entrance where we discover that the Tiegarten is not free. It will cost nine Euros each to get into the zoo. After some discussion, we decided that anthropomorphically smiling cute baby pandas, while extremely important, are not 36 Euros worth of importance. We turn back once more toward the palace. On the walk to the palace, we see a cute little tufted-eared Austrian squirrel scampering along the path—absolutely free of charge!
Throngs of people surround the ticket offices for the palace, and once we make it to the front of the line, we find out that after buying tickets we will still have to wait another hour and a half to get into the palace. They only allow a certain number of people in at a given time and it is a busy day. Mike decides that waiting that long is a complete waste of time; so instead, we take the U-bahn to Stephansplatz in the 1st District.
As we come up out of the subway in Stephansplatz, the first thing we see is the impressive spire of the magnificent St. Stephan’s cathedral. But wait. On second glance it doesn’t look quite right. And on third glance, we see that it is undergoing some reconstruction work and is wrapped completely in fabric to hide the scaffolding, and on the fabric is a detailed, to scale, picture of the cathedral spire that it covers. Thus, tourists like us who will probably only be here once can at least get an idea of what the structure looks like in spite of the reconstruction.
It is lunchtime, so we find a little sidewalk café in the shade just off the square. I have a delicious salad and a Budvar.
After lunch, we wind our way through some little side streets to the Hofburg, the Habsburg winter palace. Along the way, we stop at an antique book/print shop and Mike becomes quite engrossed in looking at prints. He finally settles on a couple of nice small floral prints to add to the small art collection he seems to be acquiring on this trip, and then we wander on until we finally run into the huge Hofburg complex—far from the entrance. We are actually a little unsure where the entrance is. In our search to find it, we stumble across the Lipizzaner stables and get to see couple of the world famous white horses hanging out and chewing on hay.
We finally work our way into the palace, which is so huge and so filled with things to see that in sheer confusion and panic we wind up in the kitchenware and china museum. Case after case of teacups, salt wells, and stew pots. Proof once again that the Habsburgs had lots of stuff. I can’t imagine why anyone would want or need 4700 colanders. And I can verify that once you’ve seen 47000 colanders, you’ve seen them all. And once you’ve seen all 470000 of them, you become really bored and tired.
So to escape the colanders, we go up one flight of stairs and find ourselves in the royal family’s living quarters and a museum dedicated to the Empress Elisabeth, wife of Emperor Franz Joseph. The change in the museum presentation technique on the upper floor is a good thing. Tell me what someone thought and felt and you are giving me a better sense of history than you will by showing me their colanders. Elisabeth of Bavaria was affectionately known as Sisi to her family, and then to history. Sisi was much loved by her Austrian subjects, both when she ruled and yet today. She was a beautiful and tragic figure in Austrian history—so much so that several movies have been made about her. She wed Franz Josef in an arranged marriage at the age of 15, but from the very beginning, she abhorred the public world in which she lived, and rebelled fruitlessly against the Habsburg court protocol. She witnessed the death of her two-year-old daughter, and later had to face the demise of her son, the crown prince, from depression and suicide at age 30. From the day of his death, she always dressed in black until her own murder at age sixty at the hands of a deranged anarchist. After learning of his wife's death, the Emperor reportedly whispered to himself, "She will never know how much I loved her."
After we leave the palace, we buy some ice cream and sit on steps next to an archeological dig directly in front of the palace entrance and eat it. Then, on the way back to our U-bahn stop in Stephansplatz, we run across a great street entertainer doing a juggling show. The show goes on for a long time and probably contains more amusing banter than actual juggling, but we are sufficiently amused to leave a big tip. We are definitely more entertained and amused by the street juggler that we’d been by the colanders.
When dinnertime rolls around Madeline is once again excited by the prospect of pizza. I check on line for pizza recommendation for the area we’re staying in, but don’t come up with any outstanding suggestions. We'd noticed an Italian ristorante near the hotel, but we decide that we should ask ask someone at the hotel for a recommendation rather than just blindly going there. The young man at the desk suggests the same ristorante we had noticed. But, when Madeline asks if its good, rather than give a direct answer, he gives her the name of another place to eat—only a block from the hotel. Gasthaus Franceschi. So that’s where we go. It is a small, but welcoming looking place. As we go through the door, however we’re a little unsettled by the man standing in the entryway talking nonsense to us. No, wait—he’s not talking to us, he seems to be talking to himself. Well, actually maybe part of the time he’s talking to us. Turns out that this is Gary Franceschi, an American, who along his wife Inge, runs this establishment. They serve Austrian fare. The only thing Italian in the entire place is Gary’s ancestry. Gary seems a little unhinged, but probably (or hopefully) is harmless, and seems to spend most his time rambling around talking to the guests and maybe also talking to the voices in his head. He is quite amused with himself. This is obvious from the way he frequently laughs at things that he says to himself. He laughs like Curly from The Three Stooges, “Nyuk, nyuck, nyuck, nyuck!”
Madeline is not happy about the absence of pizza from the menu, but as it turns out, the food is excellent. Kathy has an outstanding salad and schnitzel while Mike and I both have bratwurst and kraut. All delicious, but, as Madeline keeps pointing out, none of it is pizza. Another strike against the Ibis, for steering us wrong.
Mike has to get up very early Saturday morning to catch his flight. He has an unbelievably tedious flight back to the States. First, he has to fly from Vienna to Dusseldorf, do a layover, then fly from Dusseldorf to Munich, and do another layover before connecting with a Munich to Chicago flight. After all of that, he has to catch a bus from Chicago back to Madison. I get up at 4:00 to see him off, but he’s caught an early cab, so is gone already by the time I get to the lobby.
This is our last full day in Austria. Madeline, Kathy, and I decide to try the Schoennbrun palace one more time, only early this time, to avoid the crowds. We get there as they are opening, and our strategy works. We get right in. Even so, before we’ve finished our walk-through, the number of people in the palace has grown exponentially. By the time we leave the palace we have lots of tour groups both in front and behind us—really restricting our ability to move around. Nevertheless, the palace is well worth our time and effort to see it. Around 40 rooms are open to the public, and each room has its own story and history, from the Emperor Franz Josef’s study, which he furnished in a very Spartan style compared with the rest of the palace, and where he began work each day at 5 AM, to Hall of Mirrors, where in 1762 a six-year-old Mozart performed for Empress Maria Theresa and other assembled royals including the seven-year-old Marie Antoinette.
Finally, we leave the palace and once more heed the call of the anthropomorphically smiling baby panda. We unhesitatingly lay down our 27 Euros and enter the zoo. The zoo is pretty cool. It combines some of the old baroque zoo buildings with many more modern structures. Unfortunately, the animals are pretty much sleeping. We find the pandas. They’re asleep, too. And we don’t see any babies, anthropomorphically smiling or otherwise.
It turns out that the baby panda in the picture is Fu Hu, was born in December, is definitely at the zoo, and as website pictures show, is cuter than cute. I suppose Fu Hu was napping, just like all the other animals. We leave the animals to their slumbers and take the U-bahn back to the hotel for lunch and a nap. A nap seems like a good idea after seeing all the animals doing it. Madeline is determined to have pizza, so this time we go directly to Italian ristorante on the way to the hotel. It is closed. So we eat at the hotel. The food is OK. It is not pizza. Madeline is now deep in pizza withdrawal. After our lunch/naps, we take the S-bahn back to Stephansplatz and hike over to the MuseumsQuartier, a complex of museums housed in an amazing 250-year-old Baroque complex that was originally the Imperial Court Stables. We spend our time in the Leopold Museum looking at paintings by the likes of Egon Schiele, Gutstav Klimt, and Edvard Munch. I find it hard to imagine that all this fine art is hanging where almost a thousand Habsburg horses used to stomp and neigh.
We peruse the museum until it closes, and take the S-bahn back to the hotel, arriving around dinnertime. As we pass the little ristorante, we find that it is open! It turns out to be a cozy little place—just a few tables, but it is great! They’re having Asparagus Week, so we all get a bowl of cream of asparagus soup, then we all get pizza and some appropriate beverages. The food is good, the service is friendly, but I do not remember the name of the place. A later Google search is fruitless. Regardless, it is a memorable meal, and it is our last dinner in Austria.
The next morning, Easter Sunday, we have breakfast, check out of the Ibis, walk down to the Westbahnhof, and board the train for our trip home.
Vienna, like most European cities, was at one time a walled city. It was necessary to have walls to protect the city from invading Ottomans (the Turks, not the furniture), or any other marauding armies that happened along. But by the middle of the 19th century, the nature of war had changed and Austrian Emperor Franz Josef decided to demolish the city walls. (War had not ended, of course, it had just changed to the point that the walls were no longer protective. This was about a century before the aerial bombardment of Vienna by the Allies in WWII.) In place of the walls, he built the Ringstrasse, the wide boulevard that encircles old Vienna. Old Vienna is now referred to as “The 1st District”, and is the historic heart of the city, as well as the most expensive real estate. The villages and towns that encircled Vienna outside of its walls were incorporated into Vienna at the time the Ringstrasse was built and were given district numbers. I have been told that the lower the number, the more prestigious (and expensive) the district. While most the tourist sites are in the 1st District, I had decided that there was no reason to stay there, since hotels there are more expensive, and since public transportation is good throughout Vienna.
Thus, on this day, around six o’clock our train pulls into the Westbahnhof in Mariahilf, the 6th District. We get off the train and find our way to our hotel, the Ibis Wien Mariahilf, that we soon find to be an overpriced, 340 room, bland, uninspired tourist barn. I had reserved two adjoining rooms, each with a double and a single bed. What we find upon check-in is two rooms with double beds. After some back and forth with the desk, I am able to acquire a room with two beds for Mike and Madeline. By making the switch though, we no longer have adjoining rooms, and are not even on the same floor.
The weather has turned quite warm and we find that our hotel rooms are even warmer. Every other hotel that we’ve stayed at in Austria and Germany has had windows that opened. Not this one. The windows are locked and there are small signs explaining that opening the windows is not necessary since the hotel is air-conditioned. The air-conditioning does not seem to work. I call the desk about the stuffy, hot room and nonfunctioning air-conditioner. The young woman I speak with tells me that she will make sure that our problem is dealt with within ten minutes (signs in the elevator proclaim that guests problems will be addressed by the hotel staff within ten minutes). She says that she doesn’t know how to explain it in English, but the solution, nevertheless, is less than ten minutes away. In maybe nine minutes there is a knock at our door. When I open the door, a young woman is standing there, perhaps the same young woman I had spoken to on the phone. She is holding an oscillating fan. She hands it to me and says that this will solve the problem of my stuffy room. By the time I recover from my shock and disbelief, she’s gone, and I’m holding an oscillating fan. The weather cools down outside, but the room never cools. I use the fan. The air conditioning never works. By the second night, Mike and Madeline also have an oscillating fan.
Kathy is suffering from a cold that had been developing for the last several days, so she decides spend some quality time in our room with the oscillating fan, while Mike, Madeline, and I go out for dinner. Madeline mentions pizza, but we wind up at a nearby restaurant serving good beer and standard Austrian fare. It is late by the time we get back to the hotel, so we call it a night.
The next morning we have breakfast in the hotel’s charmless subterranean breakfast facility. The food is OK, but there are too many people crammed into the available space.
This is Mike’s last day in Austria, so we decide that he should choose our activities for the day. Mike decides that we will start at Schoennbrun, the opulent summer palace of the Habsburgs, the family that ruled Austria for over six centuries, and also ruled over Spain, and numerous other countries. The Habsburgs collected countries (through conquest, marriage, midnight poker games, etc.) like other people collect stamps, Star Trek memorabilia, or rubber ducks. I’ve been told that my great-grandmother Svec was upset to her dying day that her immigration papers to the U.S. listed her nationality as Austrian. She was Bohemian. The Austrians were the conquerors.
We reach Schoennbrun after a short ride on the U-bahn. I am immediately impressed with the sheer scale of the place. It is the sort of place where an emperor would live. The grounds cover 145 sculpted and manicured acres. The massive main palace has 300 rooms. If you include the rooms in the ancillary buildings, there are 1441 rooms in the entire complex. And this was the just the summer home.
This is the most visited tourist site in Austria, which is obvious when we arrive at ten o’clock by the long lines of people waiting to get in the palace. My guide books suggests that while most people start their exploration of Schoennbrun with the main palace, an alternative is to first climb the hill to the Gloriette, a small columned building on a hilltop, to get a bird’s-eye view of the grounds. Given the long lines to the palace, we choose that option. The hike to the Gloriette is not a short one. The day is already hot so we follow a path up the hill that keeps us in the shade of a line of trees. We pause at the elaborate Neptune Fountain at the base of the hill, and then make the climb to the Gloriette. Both Neptune’s Fountain and the Gloriette were added as part of the redesign that occurred in the 1770’s under the empress Maria Theresa. She was so fond of the Gloriette that when her corpulence and age prevented her from walking to the top of the hill, she would have litter bearers carry her to the top. Since we have to walk up on our own power, it is nice to find a pleasant outdoor café on the back side of the Gloriette when we get to the top. I have a wonderful coffee and ice cream treat. The others try to make me feel guilty by ordering water. But I do not feel guilty at all and have a lot more fun than they do. I can imagine Maria Theresa sitting in the Gloriette consuming large amounts of coffee and ice cream. Yay for being old and fat and enjoying life!
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| Gloriette and Neptune Fountain |
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| Schoenbrunn Palace from Gloriette |
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| Anthropomorphically Smiling Baby Panda - As Seen On Zoo Sign |
Throngs of people surround the ticket offices for the palace, and once we make it to the front of the line, we find out that after buying tickets we will still have to wait another hour and a half to get into the palace. They only allow a certain number of people in at a given time and it is a busy day. Mike decides that waiting that long is a complete waste of time; so instead, we take the U-bahn to Stephansplatz in the 1st District.
As we come up out of the subway in Stephansplatz, the first thing we see is the impressive spire of the magnificent St. Stephan’s cathedral. But wait. On second glance it doesn’t look quite right. And on third glance, we see that it is undergoing some reconstruction work and is wrapped completely in fabric to hide the scaffolding, and on the fabric is a detailed, to scale, picture of the cathedral spire that it covers. Thus, tourists like us who will probably only be here once can at least get an idea of what the structure looks like in spite of the reconstruction.
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| Stephansdom Spire Partially Covered with Renovation Facade |
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| -Lunch- |
We finally work our way into the palace, which is so huge and so filled with things to see that in sheer confusion and panic we wind up in the kitchenware and china museum. Case after case of teacups, salt wells, and stew pots. Proof once again that the Habsburgs had lots of stuff. I can’t imagine why anyone would want or need 4700 colanders. And I can verify that once you’ve seen 47000 colanders, you’ve seen them all. And once you’ve seen all 470000 of them, you become really bored and tired.
So to escape the colanders, we go up one flight of stairs and find ourselves in the royal family’s living quarters and a museum dedicated to the Empress Elisabeth, wife of Emperor Franz Joseph. The change in the museum presentation technique on the upper floor is a good thing. Tell me what someone thought and felt and you are giving me a better sense of history than you will by showing me their colanders. Elisabeth of Bavaria was affectionately known as Sisi to her family, and then to history. Sisi was much loved by her Austrian subjects, both when she ruled and yet today. She was a beautiful and tragic figure in Austrian history—so much so that several movies have been made about her. She wed Franz Josef in an arranged marriage at the age of 15, but from the very beginning, she abhorred the public world in which she lived, and rebelled fruitlessly against the Habsburg court protocol. She witnessed the death of her two-year-old daughter, and later had to face the demise of her son, the crown prince, from depression and suicide at age 30. From the day of his death, she always dressed in black until her own murder at age sixty at the hands of a deranged anarchist. After learning of his wife's death, the Emperor reportedly whispered to himself, "She will never know how much I loved her."
After we leave the palace, we buy some ice cream and sit on steps next to an archeological dig directly in front of the palace entrance and eat it. Then, on the way back to our U-bahn stop in Stephansplatz, we run across a great street entertainer doing a juggling show. The show goes on for a long time and probably contains more amusing banter than actual juggling, but we are sufficiently amused to leave a big tip. We are definitely more entertained and amused by the street juggler that we’d been by the colanders.
When dinnertime rolls around Madeline is once again excited by the prospect of pizza. I check on line for pizza recommendation for the area we’re staying in, but don’t come up with any outstanding suggestions. We'd noticed an Italian ristorante near the hotel, but we decide that we should ask ask someone at the hotel for a recommendation rather than just blindly going there. The young man at the desk suggests the same ristorante we had noticed. But, when Madeline asks if its good, rather than give a direct answer, he gives her the name of another place to eat—only a block from the hotel. Gasthaus Franceschi. So that’s where we go. It is a small, but welcoming looking place. As we go through the door, however we’re a little unsettled by the man standing in the entryway talking nonsense to us. No, wait—he’s not talking to us, he seems to be talking to himself. Well, actually maybe part of the time he’s talking to us. Turns out that this is Gary Franceschi, an American, who along his wife Inge, runs this establishment. They serve Austrian fare. The only thing Italian in the entire place is Gary’s ancestry. Gary seems a little unhinged, but probably (or hopefully) is harmless, and seems to spend most his time rambling around talking to the guests and maybe also talking to the voices in his head. He is quite amused with himself. This is obvious from the way he frequently laughs at things that he says to himself. He laughs like Curly from The Three Stooges, “Nyuk, nyuck, nyuck, nyuck!”
Madeline is not happy about the absence of pizza from the menu, but as it turns out, the food is excellent. Kathy has an outstanding salad and schnitzel while Mike and I both have bratwurst and kraut. All delicious, but, as Madeline keeps pointing out, none of it is pizza. Another strike against the Ibis, for steering us wrong.
Mike has to get up very early Saturday morning to catch his flight. He has an unbelievably tedious flight back to the States. First, he has to fly from Vienna to Dusseldorf, do a layover, then fly from Dusseldorf to Munich, and do another layover before connecting with a Munich to Chicago flight. After all of that, he has to catch a bus from Chicago back to Madison. I get up at 4:00 to see him off, but he’s caught an early cab, so is gone already by the time I get to the lobby.
This is our last full day in Austria. Madeline, Kathy, and I decide to try the Schoennbrun palace one more time, only early this time, to avoid the crowds. We get there as they are opening, and our strategy works. We get right in. Even so, before we’ve finished our walk-through, the number of people in the palace has grown exponentially. By the time we leave the palace we have lots of tour groups both in front and behind us—really restricting our ability to move around. Nevertheless, the palace is well worth our time and effort to see it. Around 40 rooms are open to the public, and each room has its own story and history, from the Emperor Franz Josef’s study, which he furnished in a very Spartan style compared with the rest of the palace, and where he began work each day at 5 AM, to Hall of Mirrors, where in 1762 a six-year-old Mozart performed for Empress Maria Theresa and other assembled royals including the seven-year-old Marie Antoinette.
Finally, we leave the palace and once more heed the call of the anthropomorphically smiling baby panda. We unhesitatingly lay down our 27 Euros and enter the zoo. The zoo is pretty cool. It combines some of the old baroque zoo buildings with many more modern structures. Unfortunately, the animals are pretty much sleeping. We find the pandas. They’re asleep, too. And we don’t see any babies, anthropomorphically smiling or otherwise.
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| Pandas As We Found Them |
We peruse the museum until it closes, and take the S-bahn back to the hotel, arriving around dinnertime. As we pass the little ristorante, we find that it is open! It turns out to be a cozy little place—just a few tables, but it is great! They’re having Asparagus Week, so we all get a bowl of cream of asparagus soup, then we all get pizza and some appropriate beverages. The food is good, the service is friendly, but I do not remember the name of the place. A later Google search is fruitless. Regardless, it is a memorable meal, and it is our last dinner in Austria.
The next morning, Easter Sunday, we have breakfast, check out of the Ibis, walk down to the Westbahnhof, and board the train for our trip home.
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